Coventry MP Geoffrey Robinson says city is 'desolate'

[dutchman]

Coventry MP Geoffrey Robinson has claimed the city centre is "derelict" and has urged the government to give more support to regeneration projects.



The Labour MP for Coventry North West was speaking in a Commons debate on the effects of the Budget on the city.

Jim Cunningham, Labour MP for Coventry South, said £45m of council budget cuts will damage the local economy.

But Treasury Minister Chloe Smith said the government was introducing measures to grow the economy.

Speaking in the debate on Monday evening, she said a £4m government grant reflected the "higher level of need" in the city.

"I refer any listeners here tonight to the £4m grant in 2012/13 which will be £493 per person, compared to a far lower average per person across England," she said.

'Knock-on impact'

Mr Robinson said the city centre had little appeal and had become "desolate".

"The trouble is the inner city centre has become a derelict part of Coventry," he said.

"People don't eat there, it isn't an area for people to congregate, spend time.

"It's desolate and leads to all those activities we don't want to see in any of our city centres."

Mr Cunningham said the cuts to the council's budget over the next two or three years would have a "knock-on impact" on local businesses and employment.

In February, the council said it plans to cut 40 management jobs within the next 12 months to go towards reducing its budget by £17m.

[Spuffler]

Most people are making the mistake of thinking that "desolation" is an unintended result; it almost certainly is intentional, by this government.

[dutchman]

Most people are making the mistake of thinking that "desolation" is an unintended result; it almost certainly is intentional, by this government.

Oddly enough Spuffler, the current state of Coventry's city centre is one of the few things I don't blame the Tory government for.

[dutchman]

Coventry was desolate long before the current government, it's been under Labour's control since the war, apart from two brief periods, and they ignored all the warnings about the post war plans and the poor economic landscape - reliance on a few large firms for the local economy.

In fairness so did the Tories during the periods they were in office.

I actually voted Tory for the first and only time in my life in the 2008 local election, mainly becsuae they supposedly "opposed" the widening of the Butts Road/Spon End Lane.

Within days of being elected they had already begun widening the Butts Road to seven lanes and Councillor Lister had sold his nearby car showroom and moved it to another part of town!

I'm happy to report that Lister's former showroom is now the thriving location of Godiva Carpets.

[Spuffler]

"reliance on a few large firms for the local economy." There were more than a few. Coventry had the aircraft industry, cars, fork lifts, machine tools, motor cycles, bicycles, and electronics/radio. Quite a spectrum - more than just about anywhere else, except perhaps London and Brum. Indeed, the latter was mostly small firms - hundreds and hundreds of them. And it wasn't just the large firms in Coventry, either - what about all the firms that supplied them? Some, I know, are still there. Those large firms should have formed a secure foundation for a good sound local economy to this day, and if they had:
a) innovated instead of becoming complacent and lazy
b) been well-managed
c) kept up to date with modern machinery and methods

They would still mostly be there and competitive. Take Alfred Herbert's. I went for an interview in the late 70s, answering a large and somewhat flamboyant, bullish advert about their wonderful future in NC controlled machines, for which they were developing new controllers. I was shocked by what I saw there. The wonderful future was dependent on a couple of guys in a wire-netting pen in the middle of a scruffy old machine shop, playing with already out of date 8-bit computers that they were programming in assembler language, and the interviewer proudly told me that they were 'experimenting with a view to developing new controllers, and needed additional expertise to help them.' They weren't going to succeed in a million years like that! The company was clearly on its last legs, and the lurch into digital methods was a last-ditch clutching at straws. Coventry Climax was in a similar state 3 or 4 years before - stuck in a time-warp. These major industries were thrown away by incompetent management that was more - much more - interested in promoting their own interests and ignoring what was happening in the factories they "managed" than in any form of reality. IT NEED NOT HAVE HAPPENED! Did the Germans sit on their hands like this? Like Hell they did! Did France, the US, Japan? Of course not. The fate of Coventry's industry was symptomatic of what was wrong with the country as a whole - and still is. Finance is/was attractive because it was easy money, instead of having to actually work at keeping proper industries competitive and viable.

[Spuffler]

Whilst I'm not disagreeing with you Flapdoodle, BL firms were once individual companies - and prospered. BL was a disaster for the motor industry, whatever way you look at it, with poor management, inefficiency, old plant and premises. But the same could be said of the other major firms such as Herbert's and Gauge and Tool. You say that Coventry didn't have the hight tech skills; what about GEC? Part of GEC was building computers. GEC stagnated because it had a policy of not spending money; in the 70s it sat on the biggest mountain of money of any company in the UK. But as soon as any investment was needed its owners would rather shut down plants than invest. The end result was inevitable.

Coventry has had a long history of industries growing, booming, then collapsing. Every one of those industries was a manufacturing industry. The watch industry remained a cottage industry (with two notable exceptions) to the bitter end, whist the Swiss formed large modern companies in modern factories. No cottage industry can compete with a properly set up industry with modern factories, methods, and plant. Bicycle firms were little better. Many car firms were undercapitalised, small, and uncompetitive until the big conglomerates such as Rootes and Austin-Morris bought them up - and then carried on the same tradition, just on a larger scale. Look at Jaguar now, and compare it with Jaguar's heyday of the 1950s. In the 50s, it acquired the old moving track from Standard after the 1956 fire; that track was scrapped by Standard, but it was still in use when I left Jag in 1984. Now it has had proper investment and has new factories it is doing very well thank you.

Too many fimrs in this country have caved in in the face of Chinese competition, rather than modernise. We can't compete with cheap Chinese labour without maximum efficiency, and that means automation and the best possible manufacturing methods and plant. The Germans haven't suffered as we do, yet their pay is far higher, and so are their manufacturing infrastructure costs; if they could do it, so could we - if we got rid of the mentality of "fast buck" returns, and relying on getting people to do what machines should be doing. There's no way of getting British workers to compete with the Chinese on the basis that they can be forced to work harder, it simply isn't the issue that needs to be addressed if we are to compete.

I agree that Coventry didn't have the service infrastructure that you refer to, but the point is, it didn't need to, if it hadn't allowed its firms to die as it did. and, of course, Coventry isn't the only British city to suffer this type of decline, by any means.